PaleoJay's Smoothie Cafe

Thursday, May 28, 2015

￼ One very important component of a good natural diet that you are probably missing out on is…Apple Cider Vinegar! ACV has been recommended since the time of Hippocrates, by Hippocrates, and that is high accolades indeed, since he is the founder of Western medicine!

Of course, the modern day practitioners of the art he founded, the AMA and the doctors under that umbrella, have strayed very far from the natural cures Hippocrates touted, since he believed health lay in our diet and lifestyle, and modern medical practitioners ignore nutrition and lifestyle almost totally, relying instead on the latest and greatest pills, potions, and surgeries. But we know better now, don’t we? We are, you might say:

“As to diseases, make a habit of two things — to help, or at least, to do no harm.”

― Hippocrates

Now those are some quotes I’d like to hear from MY family doctor!

But to get back on track, back to ACV- let me say this: not only is ACV probably one of the best probiotics you can possibly take, it has a host of other benefits; so many in fact, that I recommend you have a bottle in the bathroom, and another in the kitchen!

In my daily green paleo smoothie I always include a healthy portion (several ounces) of ACV- this serves to dilute the ACV so the taste in not a problem, and also it won’t stress your tooth enamel! Always dilute the ACV when taking internally for this reason. Also, I use Bragg’s ACV- it’s like the Vitamix of vinegars- around the longest, and totally reliable to be the best! Shake the bottle before using to distribute “the Mother”; I.e. The yeasty, cloudy portion that gives the “life” to the vinegar evenly.

I recently got poison ivy while brush cutting at the family cabin. What helped immensely was ACV! I just swabbed it on the affected areas, and it took the itch right away- then, I sprinkled on baking soda (another thing you should have in your kitchen AND bathroom!), and I am totally itch free. ACV actually draws the toxins out of your skin!

ACV is a great cleaner, too- but I usually use the cheap white vinegar for that. Don’t consume white vinegar- it’s a dead product, distilled and with no food value whatsoever. But put some in a spray bottle, and it will do a better job than all of those nasty, expensive chemical cleaners that are so toxic and evil- Clean with Vinegar! It also is a great weed killer- just spray it on a weed and you will kill it, again; without toxic chemicals.

ACV can cure heartburn, dandruff (just rub it on your scalp). It’s a great antibacterial and anti fungal, and is great to gargle with for a sore throat.

Rub some on your dog or cat’s fur to kill fleas! In the ancient world they used it to cleanse wounds, so it is also great for cuts and scratches. Rub it on your face for a skin toner and acne fighter, and put it on skin moles to get rid of them as well!

ACV is truly amazing, and can change your health for the better, both inside, and on the outside of your body- naturally!

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Why should you adopt the Paleo Diet? Well, let’s say this is your goal: To get healthy, lean and very fit. To be completely disease and symptom free for your entire life without gradual deterioration, and stay happy and productive!

I’m sure anyone would agree that such an outcome would be wonderful! Perhaps you hardly know where to start though…

I can absolutely guarantee that if you will change the way you eat to be more in accordance with our evolutionary heritage, or the way we have adapted to the natural world, you will be MUCH healthier, MUCH leaner, and much HAPPIER than you are right now! And I maintain that you can make these changes, and reap these fantastic results no matter how old or young you are, no matter what shape you are in now, and that these changes will happen quite rapidly as well!

Ready to get started?

You just have to need to want to make these changes! Certain bad foods will need to be eliminated from your diet, and hopefully also the diets of your family members as well. Wouldn’t it be great if not only YOU were healthy and happy for your lifetime, but if your spouse and children were as well?? It can happen, and again, it can happen relatively quickly too.

Most people object to doing new things because of a perception that it will “cost too much” or that it will “take too much time”. Your new paleo lifestyle will do neither of those things, but will instead save you money by eliminating all money spent on bad, processed foods! In addition, not driving to fast food joints but instead focusing primarily on home cooked, grilled, and slow cooked foods, you will create a family home life centered around hearth and home, as it has been throughout the vast majority of human history. You will be going Back to the Future!

Imagine yourself lean and well muscled, right up into old age! Imagine being able to do things in your 80’s that most people can’t do in their 30’s- you can be healthy fit and happy, without degenerative disease, just be following the Paleo sort of diet- and it’s not that hard!

Once begun, half done as they say: so let’s get started with the ACTION PLAN!

First, I would tell you to give up wheat!

This means bread, pasta, breakfast cereals, anything made from wheat. Why? In a word, wheat is not what it was prior to the 1970’s, when the modern form of hyper-productive, gluten loaded wheat was created in a laboratory! This is not the wheat of the bible, or the waving fields of grain that grew in American farms for our history- this is a twisted Franken-wheat, and it will destroy, inevitably, the lining of your intestines, making you vulnerable to all the modern diseases of degeneration, while at the same time fattening you up like a grain fed farm animal! So NO WHEAT.

Second, minimize sugar!

Sugar is also horrible in that it spikes your blood sugar, which stimulates insulin to bring it down, which leads to more hunger for more sugar, and a repetition of the cycle, over and over, day after day!

Eventually, the one-two punch of Wheat and Sugar will deliver you into the hands of diabesity, or syndrome X, which is the precurser to all modern disease! Interestingly, wheat also falls into the sugar category, as it turns to sugar right in your mouth! YUCK! And it also kind of sticks as a sugary coating on your teeth and gums… just imagine the dental horrors in your future from that.

I don’t expect you to totally eliminated sugar from your diet, but for the first 30 days or so you really should- then, you will get the fastest results and realize just what kind of harm it was doing to you. A small piece of good dark chocolate is actually quite good for you- it’s loaded with anti-oxidents after all- but keep it small.

The rest is easy, really: eat like people did throughout history:

Meat, fish and fowl, raised naturally in the open air and water. Not in confined animal feeding operations which are little more than animal concentration camps, and infested with disease and bad food- bad for them and for us! These animals are kept alive with huge amounts of antibiotics and other drugs for the brief time they are kept alive before becoming OUR food- humanely raised, pastured animals and wild game are far better sources of food for us, and for the planet.

LOTS of vegetables- I mean lots! Cover your heated veggies with loads of pastured butter (Kerry Gold is one, and Organic Valley from here in Southwestern Wisconsin is another). The very best way to get enough vegetables in your new paleo diet is to make a Paleo Green Smoothie- my recipe is on www.paleojay.com, but in truth adding a lot of veggies, fresh or frozen into a can of coconut milk in a Vitamix blender along with some kefir and some berries or other fruit will work no matter what you do!

Fruit is also wonderful, but you can go overboard on fruit- there is one fellow who consumes 36 bananas per day! Don’t go this route…

There is plenty more about the Paleo or Ancestral lifestyle and diet; in fact so much as it evolves (the paleo movement is NOT static) and as new research comes in, it is incorporated into the ideals of that which we call Paleo! Conventional medicine right now is all about ignoring new discoveries, and protecting the status quo of big food, big medicine, big government, and big pharma!

Get started on Paleo, and you will stop yourself from being victimized by those big entities- you won’t need their pills and surgeries, because you have learned not to fatten yourself on their fake foods!

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

That sounds rather severe, but it really isn’t- think of it as a really slow, easy way to “clear the cobwebs” and slowly rev up the old bodily and mental machinery. I don’t mean to say you should bounce up out of bed and charge away to sprint, do pull ups and pushups, and then jog for an hour, followed by stretching- not at all!

I want you to slowly awaken after a full 8 hours plus of restful sleep, in a totally blacked out room. Take a series of deep, costal type breaths lying on your back in bed: inhale slowly, as deeply as you can, first expanding your diaphragm down by your belly, and then slowly filling up the upper portion of your lungs completely- then slowly exhale. Do this 5-10 times, and you will be completely awake! Go to the bathroom, and then you can go like me downstairs into the kitchen, where I start the water boiling for my coffee and tea, and do some quick warmup motions on each set of joints- elbow, neck, knees, back, shoulders- just easily rotating the joints to get the synovial fluid going, readying them for the day. Just like a CAT.

Next, I take my first cup of coffee, laced with a teaspoon or so of coconut oil, and go to the gym... my living room! Barefoot and with minimal clothing. You can do similarly, but a room with a tv or computer is really nice- there you can do your morning workout with a Netflix show on!

Spread a yoga mat on the floor, and start your exercises- for my money, virtual resistance exercises are perfect to start- they completely revitalize the body as they refresh and strengthen it. Go methodically throughout your entire musculature. Then, go down to the mat and stretch! Finish with a back bridge if you can, and then go to your rebounder, and bounce on that for another 10 minutes.

Only watch your Netflix favorite while you are exercising- this will make you eager for the next morning when you can pick up where you left off. Trust me, once you’ve done this for awhile, you will find the perfect exercises for you, and you will relish this early morning routine. As you progress, you can add in more exercises- for instance, twice per week I also do several hundred pushups in sets of 30-40 with different hand spacings, alternating with hindu pushups, hindu squats, and straight-legged situps. But just twice per week maximum!

The daily routine, with the virtual resistance, self resisted exercise like curls with one limb resisting the other, the stretching and the rebounding can, and should, ideally be done daily- it is that gentle, and pleasant. But don’t mistake- it is also very, very effective in strengthening every inch of your body, from your neck to your toes.

Done in this manner, daily exercise is restorative, nothing to dread but something to look forward to. And you will be setting yourself up from the start for what will inevitably be a happy and productive day!

Thursday, May 7, 2015

One thing that I have noticed that many Paleo People seem to omit from the many changes they make in implementing an ancestral or paleo type of lifestyle is to eliminate some really bad things. They give up grains (hard) and minimize sugars (also hard to do) in their lives, take up daily exercise and easy movement, and go to bed early to get a full 8 ours plus of sleep per night in a totally blacked-out bedroom. They take great pains to cultivate their tribe of family, friends and church, connecting and inter-reacting on a regular basis! They are almost THERE...

But they still go to the store, and buy incredibly toxic products, products of poison like chemical cleaners, personal care products like soaps and shampoos that are loaded with petroleum byproducts like sodium lauryl sulphate. Sulfates strip the skin of its natural oils and increase penetration of the skin’s surface. They are also irritants for people with sensitive skin or eczema. This is in almost every commercial soap or body wash and shampoo, and eliminating it made a huge difference for me!

Fragrance. Bottom line: If the ingredient is vague, it’s probably hiding something. “Fragrance” could actually be a cocktail of chemicals and you’d never know it. The FDA doesn’t require companies to disclose the breakdown of a fragrance’s ingredients to consumers because the chemicals that produce fragrance are considered “trade secrets.” Most of the time, synthetic chemicals and cancer-causing toxins (like phthalates, used to make fragrances last longer) are hiding under that one sneaky term. Constant exposure to fragrances has been shown to negatively impact the central nervous system and can trigger allergies, migraines and asthma symptoms.

Parabens. These ingredients are estrogen mimickers—meaning that once applied to the skin, they enter the bloodstream, and the body mistakes them for estrogen. When the body thinks there is an abnormally high amount of estrogen present in the bloodstream due to the presence of these hormone disrupters, it reacts in various ways: decreasing muscle mass, increasing fat deposits, causing early onset of puberty and spurring reproductive difficulties in both men and women.

And lastly, there is Triclosan. This chemical is most often found in antibacterial soap. Recent studies have found that triclosan actually promotes the emergence and growth of bacteria resistant to antibiotic cleansers. It also creates dioxin, a carcinogen that has been found in high levels in human breast milk. Dioxins have disruptive effects on theendocrine system and negatively affect thyroid functions. And here’s a fun fact: dioxin is the primary toxic component of Agent Orange!

Think about it. If we are washing our bodies with soap that contains harmful ingredients every single day, this adds up over a lifetime to wreak havoc on our health.

Since there is minimal government testing on these chemicals, it becomes up to us, as smart consumers, to make informed decisions as to what does and doesn’t go on our skin.

Get good quality, natural, coconut oil based or other natural fat based soaps, shampoos and body washes. They are out there: God made products, combined in low tech ways to make honest to God products!

Just like you should only eat natural, God made foods, you should only use natural, God made cleaning products...

And don’t even THINK about throwing a little Roundup on those cracks in your sidewalk... oh my God- the main ingredient in roundup by Monsanto is glyphosate.

Glyphosate affects your gut bacteria just as it does weeds in your yard.

It causes extreme disruption of your beneficial microbes’ functions and lifecycles. This sets YOU up for autoimmune disease! By killing your beneficial bacteria, which it tends to do preferentially, it allows your BAD, sugar-thriving bacteria to multiply, causing things like small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, or SIBO, and all of the downstream results of weight gain, acid reflux, asthma, and- again- autoimmune diseases of all sorts.